“Ryan Paul & The Ardent, whose tune has changed recently from moody to majestic and is definitely one to watch in 2011.” – Twin Cities Metromix

As a songwriter, I have gone through several phases. When this band started up, I was writing Americana/alt-country music. Most of those tunes were put on our first record, La Vita Nuova. In early 2010, I was writing music that took us far enough away from the Americana genre, that a complete reformat was necessary. In order to document that change, we tracked Cute Souvenirs Session EP in a quick 10 hour session.

At the start of 2011, I found myself with a new batch of songs. I guess I’m not even sure how to sum them up. I had assumed that I was moving in the same bracket that held songs from Cute Souvenirs. However, upon debuting two of the songs at The Southern Songbook, co-host and friend, Adam Levy said, “Judging by this new batch of songs, I think you have moved into a good place.” The (above) quote from Metromix came shortly after.

Could it be that different? Maybe it’s not. I’m not sure if I am growing into something or if I am moving through another phase. Either way, I am having fun sorting through these new compositions with the band. We’ve just begun toying with them. There is really no telling where they can go…

We have announced some February and March dates. There will be plenty more to come. The first is Feb 4 @ The Turf Club in St. Paul. We love that venue and absolutely love the bands we are playing with. Check HERE for all of our announced dates!

2009 was a pretty wicked year. We are really looking forward to what is in store for 2010. I’ve been meeting with our new manager from Invisible Button Entertainment and she has some amazing ideas for going forward.

We’ve been working on a video project called “Confessions”. I’d like to give you a preview of Part 6.
Here are some of my confessions about La Vita Nuova, my Jimmy Peterson story, and some of my ideas for the next year. Enjoy!

If you missed our show with Kid Dakota at the Turf, we were able to pull a video from that night as well. Some of it kind of cracks me up…

I’d also like to remind you that there are ALWAYS fresh and free live downloads from our “Live Archive” page. You can sample and download in any format you like.

I have decided to start doing some video taping of shows (pre & post). This was my first attempt. There is some funny stuff there, but I couldn’t include the pieces in their entirety because I was jerking the camera around so much. I’ll get better at it soon…

Around the 20 second mark – Sam Roberts confesses about his Flip Video recorder…Around the 44 second mark – Steve Goold confesses about his heavy blog traffic and possible suspicions as to where the hits may be coming from…Around the 55 second mark is video of the debut of our new song “Slow.Steady”

Sam and his band were really great! It was a lot of fun to play and hang out with them. Sam sent me home with some vinyl and some of his ideas about keeping shows interesting.